Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

By the end of the 1950s, more than 30,000 families had been relocated into the cotton concentrations. The majority of cotton planters didn’t adhere. Women, in particular, were resistant to a new scheme that would leave the transmission of property in the hands of men, as imposed by the colonial social model.[126] And soil quality was now the overarching factor determining the location of concentrations. Soil scientists didn’t make much of complaints associated with abandoning the protection of ancestor spirits, guardians of fertility. Also contributing to the unwillingness of natives to resettle was the fact that the translation of the experimental station model into the fields demanded harder and longer work than before. The very same overseers recognized that “within the concentrations we had more or less perfect control over the work of each peasant every day. We could never have exercised such power when their cotton fields were dispersed.”[127]

It may be argued that 30,000 families were a small proportion of the total number of cotton planters in Mozambique, roughly 30 percent of the total number. But the fact is that even for that majority of natives that didn’t live under the scientific rule of the cotton concentrations CICA scientists were a constant presence: distribution of selected and disinfested seeds produced at the experimental stations; decision about the areas for growing cotton, taking into consideration soil and climate conditions, the best strains for each region, how to prepare soil and defend it against erosion and loss of fertility, when and how to seed, when and how to weed, and when and how to pick. The connection between the recommendations made in the colony’s capital (Lourenço Marques) and the field was enforced by four delegations, 22 sectors, and 195 local agencies. By the mid 1960s, shortly after the coercive labor system was abolished, 2,700 officials of the Cotton Institute, the new name of the Board, were responsible for managing around half a million cotton growers planting about 350,000 hectares with cotton.[128]

A case in point of the tight connections between laboratory work and changing cotton fields is again the breeding effort of CICA researchers. In the 1940s the requisite of selecting strains resistant to Jassid attacks was considered a necessary condition to the very same future of cotton in sub-Saharan Africa. Twenty years later, breeders’ aims would change radically. In the 1960s, plants resistant to Jassid were perceived as a hindrance to achieve higher productivity. Jassid resistance is associated mainly to pubescent leaves that hinder insect action. However, for cotton to be picked up mechanically it is necessary to employ a chemical defoliant, so that leafs won’t be picked together with the cotton fiber. The problem is pubescent leafs of Jassid-resistant plants, such as the U4 variety, stick to the cotton fiber after the application of a defoliant, reducing drastically its value. Highly productive operations demanded smooth leafs, doing away with Jassid-resistant strains by employing huge amounts of DDT and other expensive pesticides. Jassid resistance is thus a property tightly connected with manual workers, cultivating in their small plots low productivity strains, demanding much less capital. In the beginning of the 1970s the new strains that the research Center was proud to announce presented poor resistance to Jassid, but were highly recommended for farmers relying on machines and making use of generous amounts of DDT.[129]

These new strains, such as the SB8 selected from American upland varieties, were the ones used by the new white settlers that began to dominate cotton growing in northern Mozambique in the late 1960s, and that in 1974, just before independence, were already responsible for 80 percent of the region’s production. These new Portuguese settlers, with the support of local authorities, occupied the best lands and even took over the previous areas of cotton concentrations. The new rise in international markets in cotton prices attracted many whites for cotton cultivation. In addition, the colonial government intervened directly in changing the color of cotton from black to white. The new settler cotton farms in the north were designed as buffer zones against the guerrilla actions of the independence movement in one of the most disputed areas of Mozambique.[130]

^{Figure 5.9 Genealogy of cotton varieties cultivated in Mozambique.}

^{(P. Pereira de Carvalho, “Breve descrição das principais cultivares de algodoeiro existentes em Moçambique,” Agronomia Moçambicana 1, no. 3, 1967: 149–158)}